John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

A little while back I came across this EHR comparison chart on the Amazing Charts website. I was really intrigued. The first thing to note about the chart is that this is a page that’s designed to “sell” the Amazing Charts product. It’s actually a really smart move by Amazing Charts to use these comparisons as a way to increase their profile and compare them against many of the large EHR companies out there.

My biggest problem with an EHR comparison chart like this is that Amazing Charts conveniently decided to list themselves against a whole list of the HUGE and generally legacy EHR software companies. I don’t see the comparison chart including any of the Free EHR vendors. There are no EHR software companies that have come out in the past couple years on that list. There aren’t any of the more nimble EHR software companies that have done similar to Amazing Charts and focused on building an EHR company using revenue instead of outside funding.

Point being that an EHR comparison chart should include more of the 300+ EHR vendors that are out in the market today. If you only compare yourself to the largest and most expensive EHR software, then of course you look a lot cheaper. Plus, it seems they also focused on the most expensive EHR software from the companies that offer multiple EHR software as well.

The other challenge that they note in a footnote is that getting good pricing and EHR market share data is really hard. Most providers don’t publish it and as Dr. K mentions in this well written Future of Meaningful Use piece, “The sum of the number of installed users claimed by each of the top EMR vendors exceeds the number of practicing physicians in the U.S.”

Then, that EHR comparison chart also focuses a bit too much on the various EHR ratings services. I won’t dive into my feelings about the EHR ratings services that exist out there. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t base my EMR selection on any of those ratings services.